Hippie's, free love, free speech, & women's lib

During the time between the early 1950's and the early 1970's a lot of things changed in our culture. These changes bled into the film and television industries just as those same industries took up the causes and reflected them back at us, fueling the fires of change.

After World War II life was good in the US. Manufacturing turned back to making things for peacetime life instead of war supplies. It didn't take very long before we were involved in the Korean war. During both WWII and the Korean conflict a lot of women went to work jobs that were traditionally held by men. I think a lot of them enjoyed that taste of being independent financially. That was a time when married women usually stayed home and raised kids and cleaned the house and were dependent on their husbands for any money they ever got to spend. I think these times when it was acceptable for women to work manufacturing jobs and other traditionally male jobs planted the seed in the minds of many women that later, in the next generation bloomed into the women's lib movement. It was in the mid 60's that women's lib started spreading around the country. The civil rights movement was also going on in the late 50's and the 60's. It was a period of people noticing the inequities and fighting to correct them. These movements for equal rights for blacks and women helped create the environment that gave rise to hippie's. They were anti-establishment, anti-status quo, and believed in peace, freedom to live as you chose and speak about anything you wanted to. Some of them joined together, living in communes, which a lot of people said was an attempt to do away with the traditional family unit. When the government started drafting men for the Vietnam war a lot of hippies fled to Canada to avoid having to kill people.

During this time period there were advancements in technology that allowed new things to be done in filming, better camera's, etc. Television was thriving and movie makers had to be more innovative to attract people to go out to see movies. Also, television was more tightly controlled and couldn't broadcast anything outside the tight moral standards of the average mid-west family. Movies had a little more freedom to be a little looser with morality and nudity.
Drive-in movie theatre's became popular since a whole family could pile into the family station wagon and see a couple of movies at a pretty cheap price.